The educational disparities that have dogged Latinos in Colorado also appear in Boulder County.

However, the Boulder Valley School District has made improving academic performance and graduation rates for all students a priority and seen significant gains in recent years.

In 2006, 62.5 percent of the district's Latino students graduated at all, compared to 89.9 percent of white students. In 2012, 78.1 percent of Latino students graduated on time, compared to 92.5 percent of white students.

District officials caution against making too much of race or ethnicity. Being Latino by itself doesn't affect student achievement. However, being from a family where English is not the first language or being from a poor family does, and Latino students are much more likely than their white counterparts to face those challenges.

According to the Boulder County Trends Report issued by the Community Foundation, 32 percent of Latino children here live in poverty, compared to 6 percent of non-Hispanic white children.

BVSD Superintendent Bruce Messinger said the focus on providing more support for students who face additional challenges represents a change both locally and nationally. In the past, public schools provided one kind of education. Those who thrived, thrived, and those who didn't, left. Now, schools find ways to provide more resources, whether it's additional instruction during the school day or more outreach to parents.

"The difference is that we don't just give up anymore," he said.

When BVSD decided several years ago to tackle its dropout rate, district officials pulled the school files of every student who had left without completing school and tried to find where things had gone wrong. The signs were often there, long before high school, especially in poor school attendance.

"These were once kindergartners and first-graders with tremendous hope on their faces, and we failed them somewhere along the line," said Assistant Superintendent for School Leadership Deirdre Pilch.

The school district has expanded the support it provides to struggling students, trying to meet them where they are at and bring them up to grade level. At the high school level, there are more alternative schools and even online classes so those students can find an environment that works for them. Special counselors work with students who have failed a few classes, while the AVID program encourages students whose families have not attended college to prepare themselves.

At the same time, the Community Foundation has launched a major initiative to expand preschool access for poor children. Chris Barge, who directs the foundation's School Readiness Initiative, noted that only a quarter of students who are not reading at grade level by third grade will go on to graduate on time. And children who don't start school with the same preparation as children from better off families struggle more to learn the basic reading and math that forms the building blocks of learning, Barge said.

The waiting lists for Head Start are as long as current enrollment. There's enough money available in subsidies to support preschool for roughly 80 percent of children from poor families, but it doesn't always cover enough hours to provide viable daycare for those parents.

Messinger said BVSD officials hope a new school financing bill will open the way to publicly financed full-day kindergarten and public preschool for all four-year-olds.

The Community Foundation also hopes that the BVSD school board makes addressing the achievement gap one of its five-year goals. However, the challenges children from poor and minority families face are often multi-faceted. Single parents may work long hours, and their family situations may not be stable.

Barge said it's going to take a community wide-effort to address the issues.

"Teacher by teacher, student by student, family by family, where is the sense of urgency that every kid should be able to access a public education?" Barge said. "Are they going to become what the statistics say they're headed for?"

Jorge de Santiago, the executive director of El Centro Amistad, an advocacy group, said some Boulder Valley schools make strong efforts to reach out to Latino parents, and his own son is doing well at Casey Middle School.

But his organization has fielded complaints that students at Centennial Elementary School were sent to the principal's office just for speaking Spanish.

Gamblin said there may have been a misunderstanding between school officials and parents about why some students were disciplined, but students are not penalized for speaking their native language, he said.

De Santiago said the attitude that teachers adopt toward students can affect their attitudes toward school long after they leave a bad classroom.

However, some schools do a lot to work with parents, and El Centro Amistad has also encouraged parents to speak up and ask questions about their children's education, something that is less common in Mexico.

"In Boulder, some of the schools are taking this very seriously because they've heard from the parents and the advocates in the community," de Santiago said. "We're been working really hard over last three years to improve parent involvement. Parents don't have the same level of education, but we teach them that they do have a voice."